Please Note

Dear friends,
Due to a death in the family I will be away. I will be resuming posting the first weekend in May.
Joan.

The Great Bookwriting Sprint

This is my cat, waiting for me to come home. I'm away just now, in an undisclosed location somewhere in darkest Angus, engaged in a Bookwriting Sprint. I will return next weekend to wake her up and report on my success - or otherwise ... see you then!

I'm in Love!

It's official - I'm in love with Turnberry!

I knew that being invited to take part in the second Turnberry Children's Book Event was a very nice thing - a lovely way to round off a busy author visit season - a bit of west coast mojo to set me up for The Great Bookwriting Sprint I have planned for next week - but heavens to Betsy and blimey O'Riley, it was MORE!

From the wonderfully polite and literate notice on the golf course, to the story-telling skills of the young man who showed me my room and explained about Ailsa Craig and the Irish giants, to the concierge who smiled benignly when I told him about my cunning plan to unscrew the number on my door and stay forever, writing books and only emerging for beach walks and breakfast (oh, my, breakfast!). And THEN (the reason I was there, after all) a fully-booked Slightly Jones session with the nicest group of kids you could hope to meet on a fine spring day ... as the man said, "Bliss it was" indeed.

Thank you, Turnberry, for having me, and thanks also to my friend from Edinburgh Blackwells who sold books so elegantly and well and only briefly had mayonnaise on her nose (and then only in the privacy of her own lunch). I will stop waxing rhapsodic now and leave you with some photos that, really, say it all.








P.S. Can anyone tell what bird this is? I got two photos of it - one with a perfectly focused tail and everything else fuzzy, and this one, with a fuzzy tail. I don't recognise it at all and would love to know! Thanks!

The Eternal Spring of Dunoon

Shirt-sleeve weather in Dunoon is about as delightful as it gets. Spring air, new colour, smiling strollers along the promenade and the breeze off the water - even experimenting with the film grain setting on my camera, I couldn't quite convince myself it was ever any different. So here's my tribute to perpetual sping in sunny Dunoon - thank you for having me!